I have been enjoying exploring the ideas behind procedural worlds and in a previous post even showed a simple voxel renderer based in THREE.js which would load chunks when the camera got close enough to the edge. That was based on the great tutorial here which explains how to create a voxel-based mesh in THREE.js such that it doesn’t use all of the machine’s resources for the smallest of worlds. I found that to be an invaluable source of information and continually referenced back to that throughout the weekend. Looking back at my git logs for this project to be able to type this up, I have no intention of this post being a tutorial in itself, my progress was as follows: Walking around rather than observer view Sideways collision detection - not walking through the map Changing to a system where there was a sensible grass - sand - water height system Adding trees Another optimisation for terrain generation in addit...

 I've been working on an extension of the Voxel mesh in three JS that I built in this blog post and I'm thinking of developing it into an upcoming game at ManicVoxels.com To be able to expand the reach of the game to lower-power devices I needed to make the program more efficiently rendered. This would allow the players on the lower-powered devices to still have a reasonably sized world around them. When looking at the Greedy meshing tutorial from 0fps I really struggled to work out what the algorithm was. I then realised what is actually going on; you start in the top left, you go as far right as you can and then you go as far down as you can. You then repeat this until you have a new mesh. Once I'd worked out what greedy meshing was doing I could start to code it up. I've also added an animation of the algorithm below. In the animation, you can see the cursor moving from the top left to the bottom right. As if goes if the square is to be included in a new mesh then ...

As you may have noticed from the other posts on this blog I enjoy making things. I try as much as possible to make useful things, despite what my girlfriend says about the paper mache tower . In May this year, I was starting a new job and with it coming up to a year in the flat my girlfriend and I were considering if we needed more room. One of the issues was that we didn’t have a sofa and with both of us working from home, we didn’t really have anywhere to put a sofa. I was considering starting to go back into the office again, at least part-time and so looked into the idea of a desk that would fold out over a sofa for when I needed it, but that would fold away when I didn’t. It was quite hard to find something to meet this specification. Most of the fold-away desks just don’t work over a sofa and those that do are too small to work off. I thought that given the simple nature of a desk as a piece of furniture I would have a go at conceiving of something that would be perfect for my si...